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Hi guys! I started learning sign language just two weeks ago now - I’ve found my favourite way to learn is by doing songs! Here’s me doing 7 years.. I have decoded the signs myself so there may be some discrepancies but I hope you enjoy😁https://youtu.be/KezRL--Ahqk

Enjoy!

Verse 1:

Hi everyone. Excuse my first attempts, it is easier when I don’t have an audience but I need to push myself out of my comfort zone otherwise what is the point of learning? I have always wanted to learn. I have also signed my kids up, who I am helping to teach and practise.

hello, My names merrie and I'm from London, I hope that was signed ok. really enjoying the course so far and I cant wait to improve.

Hi everyone, hope you are all staying safe. I wanted to have a go at practising my BSL by introducing my self a little bit. Please feel free to give any tips if there is anything I don't do correctly. Thank you, Alice x P.s. I had a little list in front of me as a reference for what I wanted to say, so excuse me if I keep looking over. Also I realise my face looks really red, but it's just the lighting and my acne

I fell in love with my boyfriend and we where having normal conversations and then we went on a date and we had background music on and I said how wonderful the song was and he told me he couldn’t hear it and told me he was deaf I’m not going to let that stand in the way and I want to be able to communicate with him on a level that he feels more comfortable with

Hi, I have just completed level one and want to practice before getting stuck into level two! I noticed that there were soooo many beginners who wanted to practice. This website seems to provide a space for video chat now! Shall we get organised??? Maybe on Sunday evenings at 6pm BST we could meet in the online video chat rooms to practice. Anyone up for it? Thanks and hope to sign with you soon! Hope

Hi everyone! I am Hannah and I'm 36. I am from east Sussex (which I forgot to sign in my video!!) I have wanted to learn sign language since I was a teen but never got around to it. Unfortunately now due to chronic illness I no longer work and have the time to learn. There is also a dead person in my building who loves to chat but it can be difficult sometimes so I figured now is my chance!!

Hi all, Im Rob im 24 years old from Preston in the UK. I am deaf in both ears and have been all my life. I'm learning sign language so that in the future I can help deaf people in fitness and help them achieve their fitness goals. I am currently living out in Australia in Melbourne. I would love to connect with as many of you as i can on instagram and help have some accountability for learning sign language.

Hi Amy, I would just sign Brothers, sisters I none. From what I understand you put the topic/subject first. Hope this help. Anybody let me know if this is incorrect please. All learning together

Hello Everyone Myself and a few other individuals have started a group chat session every Saturday 2pm (GMT). We have already had 1 session and found it very useful. For those wanting to join in on our practise sessions please dm me or comment down below. We are currently using zoom, and I will send you a link to the scheduled meeting. If you are just a beginner don't be alarmed or think you are unable to join. I am doing this so that we can actually communicate with each other and benefit with other peoples experience and practise with BSL. On the day I will send/post the link to the meeting for everyone to join. Come Join In!

Try this - [sign], mean, what?

Hi, I have just started learning BSL as a hearing person and was wondering if i could join your zoom call next week as I would love to practice with people! Thanks!

Would anyone be interested joining a Facebook group to practice. I'm finding people aren't around here very often. Hopefully this will be allowed as it's purely for improving our BSL. It's called BSL forum

Hi! My name is Codie, I am 18 years old and I have started learning BSL. I am hoping to start university in September, where I will be moving from the countryside to the city to study a course which allows me to work with young children. In my work experience, I have come across children with a range of additional needs, including one boy who had never learned to speak, but was always listening and learning. Nobody in the school knew how to correctly communicate with him, meaning he was often subconsciously excluded by the other young children who found it difficult to be around him. Along with this, I work part time in retail and understand the importance of allowing people to be independent. Learning sign language would make my work place more accessible for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, and increase the independence of some people in my area who find it difficult to be alone due to needing to communicate in non-verbal ways. Along with this, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has forced me to leave school early and caused a lot of uncertainty. Learning this new skill is not only beneficial to other people, but also to myself, as it allows me to feel like I'm achieving something, even if it is only minor like learning one or two new signs. I'm excited to see how the rest of my learning goes and what else I can achieve, and to see how BSL helps my day to day life.

hello, i am Anouska. i am 37 and a mother of 3 all with special needs. i first used sign to help my then non-verbal daughter (asd) she can now talk for the most part but has a very bad stutter. i was born deaf but had an operation when i was 5 and after i had to have speech therapy to help me talk "normal". i can lip read but now my hearing is going again and i would like to be able to communicate with people. i have wanted to learn sign properly for many yrs but things always seemed to get in the way. with it being lockdown i have to time to dedicate to learning what i think is a very important skill for anyone to learn/know. i hope to see BSL being taught in all schools in the UK.

Hi, I have recorded a little video of me practicing what I have learnt. I'm on week 3. Any feedback would be really appreciated. I still feel like I'm really slow and I can't do any facial expressions or mouth any words.

Hi everyone. I started learning BSL because i became ill with Menier's disease, and was told i would become deaf, which i have but use hearing aids. I love BSL and have just finised level 3 woohoo.

Hello, I am Casey, I recently started learning BSL because it seems like a very useful skill to have. I am greatly enjoying the course so far!

Hi, nice to be here! I am learning bsl because I work supporting students at college and wish to be able to communicate better. Also this is a fascinating language to learn and I am just really interested!

Many years ago, I was artistic director of a small scale touring theatre company in Scotland, and I wanted to make our work as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. I engaged a mime artist who was also an experienced speaker of BSL to work with us, and she created a beautiful character who only communicated in BSL, and she taught the other cast members a few signs so that they could supplement their spoken text when necessary. I aimed to learn BSL myself, but life and the universe had other plans for me. Now is my time. I'm ready.

Hello Everyone, my name is David and I have recently started the BSL course online. I have progressive hearing loss and at present wear hearing aids in both my ears, my early life was in the Royal Artillery and I also play the saxophone (no surprises why I'm losing my hearing!). As I have been informed that I will continue to lose my ability to hear I thought I best start learning BSL now. My daughter is learning with me, so hopefully we'll be able to help each other along and practice what we learn. Looking forward to learning everything I can from you all!

Hi, My name is Carrie and I am learning BSL coz when I was in college(long time ago) there was a lady in my class who was deaf. I was fascinated on how she was communicating with her interpreter. Over the years I have picked up a few words but recently my nephew is not verbally communicating so we are using some signs so he can let us know what he wants. This has made me want to learn the full BSL as I work in care and would come in handy as well if I need to speak to anyone who is deaf.

hello! I'm learning BSL as my son struggles with his speech. hopefully this will make life a little easier for him!

Hi Littlebird, I completely understand how you feel. I think the receptive was the exam I was most nervous about. One of the things that actually helped me was I convinced myself I wasn't going to pass on the first time and decided to treat my exam as a practice test instead. As luck would have it (and I think luck is involved) I did end up passing and I think it was down to the following points below. I'm not sure if it will help you as everyone is different but I hope this helps: Like you, I watched a lot of BSL Zone but especially the interview style shows (e.g. Close Up) as I felt this was the most similar to the Signature Level 3 receptive exam. There were two things I focused on while watching - practising writing notes without looking down and also getting myself familiar with the feeling of not understanding everything and not panicking. I knew that if I started to panic I would completely lose concentration so I needed to practise experiencing that feeling and trying to overcome it and continue. I also used the Signature Level 3 Homework content to practise. At the time I felt that it was not worth the money I spent on it as I didn't think it was very helpful but in hindsight I think watching these videos did help. If you only have a few days, it might not be worth purchasing and the SignWorld content might be similar. When watching the videos, the main thing I practised was writing without looking down, getting used to not understanding everything and trying to pick out key details such as numbers and names. On that note, I did a quick refresher of regional numbers before the exam as I found this quite difficult. This website was helpful with that: https://bslsignbank.ucl.ac.uk/regional/numbersigns/ Trying to recognise fingerspelling made me very nervous so I practised this as much as possible when watching any BSL videos and also by using the game on this website: https://www.signlanguageforum.com/bsl/fingerspelling/fingerspelling-game/. If you haven't used it before it is really helpful as practising your understanding and can be speeded up to make it more difficult. I used YouTube videos to practise too, for example the National Deaf Children's Society YouTube channel was helpful as it had videos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiLPtwNKczw. I have to admit that the exam I did happened to be on a topic I was quite familiar with, which helped massively so I think luck is part of it. I practised the format of the exam too, so that I had the timings and the structure clear in my head so that there wouldn't be any surprises. For example, if you're watching a YouTube video or a BSL Zone video, try to watch it the same number of times that you would be able to watch it in the test. I tried to learn some key dates, names and facts to help me recognise these if they came up. This is quite hard when you have so many topics but it definitely does help. There is a Facebook Group called BSL Level 3 Certificate which is helpful too- lots of advice and questions answered. I really hope it goes well. I kept asking myself why on earth I was doing this to myself so it's also important to remember that although this is really difficult it is a worthwhile thing that you are doing and no matter what happens with the exam, you are gaining skills that are really valuable! If it also helps to know, our class all did a mock exam a couple of weeks before the real thing and we all failed the mock but all of us apart from one passed the real exam (and the one who didn't pass the first time, passed the second time). Best of luck and I really hope it goes well.

Hey folks! I've always liked the idea of sign languages conceptually, and though I have no friends or family who actually know BSL, it's been a goal for a couple of years to finally get around to learning it. Figured I'd finally use the new year to motivate me to start it up properly, and it's been a lot of fun so far memorising signs and practicing with myself in the mirror 😁 I'm based in London so I figure I'll meet or come across someone who knows BSL eventually, hopefully by then I'll be somewhat proficient and can surprise them with more than just introducing myself! Feel free to get in touch, maybe then I can chat about it with someone else who's learning instead of me continuing to annoy my flatmate with the latest thing I've learned 🙂

I think it would be great if at some point the London Newbies get together! I find that I've learnt the signs for the lessons, and can pass the tests, but when I watch videos of other people signing on here, I get lost very quickly - and hopefully meeting people can help!

Hi everyone, My name is Fran. I've made learning BSL my 2022 New Years Resolution. I've not really met anyone learning/needing to use BSL to communicate, so it's really been a solo effort to try and learn something new! I hope that one day, with a bit more confidence I might be able to organise the occasional BSL weekend coffee morning in North-West London area, where new learners (like me) and more experienced people might be able to get together and help each other develop their BSL skills as well as work towards making awareness of BSL in the community.. and maybe even make some friends!! But I've got a few more lessons to learn first!

Afternoon all, I have 70% loss both ears but as others mentioned didn't realise how much I relied on lip-reading and reading peoples facial expressions until we started all wearing masks. The last two years with COVID have left me feeling very isolated so I figured it would be a good idea to learn BSL and I am enjoying it very much.

Hi everyone, I'm Dawne and this is my second time round learning BSL, I did this course back in 2018 and really enjoyed it. I had recently started wearing hearing aids (back in 2018) and realised how much my hearing was a barrier for me. This got me thinking of learning BSL (in case my hearing ever got worse). I really enjoyed the course but once I finished it I didn't put it into practise! I have re signed to the course as it will be part of my professional development at work. I work in a primary school and want to be confident (and able) to communicate with children in a non verbal way. So here I am ready to go again with the incentive to sign what I learn! Good luck to everyone learning BSL. Thanks for reading Dawne

I've had a couple of personal experiences that have brought me here. After leaving school I worked as a teller in the local branch of a building society and one of the first customers I served was deaf. They had some issue they needed resolving but the communication barrier meant neither I or anyone else in the branch could help him. He got upset and very very angry. He shouted incomprehensibly in my face and was signing frantically. I actually thought he was going to get violent but things eventually calmed down and he left, his issue still unresolved. Some of the staff were visibly upset by the incident. I was too - but not upset for myself. I was upset for him. I could only imagine the frustration he must have felt and how isolating the world must have been for him. I took it upon myself at the time to learn at least something in BSL, no official courses, just a few things I picked up of the internet. I learned how to fingerspell, some numbers, and and some basic greetings (hello/goodbye/please/thankyou) and practiced them in a mirror for weeks and weeks in the hope that if such an event ever happened again there would be someway I could help, even if I had to spell out every letter of the conversation. A few years later I was doing a carboot sale and I saw the same man approaching my stall. I don't think he recognised me and I continued to chat away to my wife as he browsed the items on my table. When he picked up an item I was so nervous that our interaction would end the same way it had previously. He asked my wife 'How much?' but she did not understand his speech just like I hadn't in our previous encounter. Thankfully I had grasped what he had asked and was able to sign 'hello'. and '15' as I pointed to the item he was holding. (i can't recall what the item was now). He looked somewhat taken aback - he was expecting that. His face lit up. '8?' he signed back. I was picking up on his facial expressions. '12' I signed back. I couldn't believe this. I was now haggling in a language I'd never even used before. '10' he signed back (I think - I wasn't sure on that one) but at this point I was so elated that I'd been able to make that connection with him that he could've taken that item for nothing and I wouldn't have cared. I shook his hand on 10 and then as he handed over the cash and tucked the item under his arm I signed 'B-A-G'. he gave me a thumbs up and I passed him a carrier bag for his purchase. We exchanged a final sign of 'Thank you' followed by goodbye and I never saw him again. Despite having to spend the rest of the day explaining to my wfie how and why I was able to have a conversation in sign language I was so immensely pleased with myself for what I had done. So reason I'm now on here is because with the global pandemic and everyone wearing masks I imagine the world has become far more isolating for the Deaf. It makes me think and feel how I did when that man left my branch all those years ago. If I can do something to help that then I'll try me best to do it becuase when he slammed that door after our first encounter I never thought 'that went badly because he was deaf' I thought 'that went badly because I can't sign'. and I'm going to change that.

I just finished the final assessment today!🥳 I'm really sad it's over but I'm definitely going to keep learning and practising

Hi,

Did anybody see this segment on Blue Peter? Mwaksy takes a look into how BSL is a lifeline to most deaf or hard of hearing people. She visits a theatre group in Cardiff which consists of children between the ages of 3-18 who communicate via BSL. Mwaksy chats to the children and finds out how this group has empowered them as individuals, highlighting the importance of groups like these. She wants to bring the empowerment back to the Blue Peter Studio, so she is set the challenge of learning BSL in order to present a segment of the show, live on CBBC.

Hey here’s a snippet of a beautiful song in BSL/SSE! You can find loads more on my Instagram and I upload videos with BSL Interpretation on my YouTube 🥰

I'm recording a video since this is a sign language forum lol, if anyone wants to make friends through sign I'm all for it as I don't actually know anyone who signs :) say hi!

Hi everyone, My name is Phoebe. I am 20 years old and have started learning BSL today! Having worked with special needs children in the past it has always been one of my interests to learn how to sign. Thanks to lockdown and the amazing discounted offer on the british sign website I now have the opportunity to start learning. I am hoping that I will be able to undertake a role of supporting deaf students in schools in the future. Hope everyone is staying home and staying safe from coronavirus! Take care! 😃

Hey everyone! I am super excited to be here My daughter was born with a hearing impairment and wears a hearing aid every day, all day. Since I found out about her HI, I have made a conscious effort to include her in the deaf children's community and try to promote the inclusion of deaf students more in schools (I have been a school teacher for a decade, so I started a BSL project in my previous school to do this). I took my BSL Level 1 exam (Signature) last week and am expected to pass with flying colours! Yay! With that said, I am unbelievably excited to start my Level 2 in September and have been searching high and low for a group / forum just like this, where I can meet other BSL students / people from the deaf community and practice my skills. I look forward to meeting many of you soon (although, likely through Zoom!) Best wishes, Sarah

I haven't made it to any of the online sessions yet as I'm a single parent to a very active 3-year-old who likes to make a lot of noise, but I hope I can make it on the 25th! It will depend on my work as well (I'm self-employed, so when I get the chance, I work myself into the ground in the constant fear that it'll suddenly dry up!), but I really want to make time for a bit of practice with other BSL beginners if I possibly can!

Hello, my name is Natalie and I'm from Liverpool, I am 29 years old. Hopefully I signed that correctly. I really had to think about what i was doing then. Its not as easy as people may think. Im really enjoying the course so far and look forward to practicing more and improving.

Hi everyone! I'm Zoe and I'm learning BSL with a course on British Sign in between my virtual classes at uni. I'm almost at the end of my training to be a vet, so I'm hoping BSL will help me communicate with clients in the future (especially as there is a big training centre for Hearing Dogs for Deaf People nearby my hometown). I've done a bit of simple BSL in primary school, but I love learning languages and I want to improve my skills!

Hi Vicky! I am learning level 1 too and am interested in practising with your daughter and Georgia too. I'm a little bit older as well (19).

What is my name? How old am I? What is the weather like today? (2 types of weather) Who does my family consist of? What are their names?